karynfrances

I am a psych nurse working in an acute psych unit attached to a general hospital in Qld, Australia. I am an 8th year Registered Nurse and I earn approx $30 (Aust)per hour. Our EEN's earn approx $20. If that helps?

Surely if you are in a large public hospital you would have access to a mobile psych team that could follow up these people through a phone call etc. I think you need to refer these people on to psych for the patients sake and to keep you safe in your job knowing you had done all you could for your clients.

I work in an acute psych ward attached to a general hospital. We have something in place along the HPPD in place. We start with basic nurse numbers for each shift and then according to the patient acuity our numbers can go up from there, we do not lessen our numbers though as a matter of safety. Generally this means more overtime for overworked nurses!

Yes the stigma exists, but people like you mrs c k will help to lessen this just by asking why

Typical of the government, need to see efficiency and productivity gains to warrant a higher increase in wages. I work in Qld and we have full time nurses working overtime shifts, 20 - 40 hours per fortnight sometimes, as we have not got the staff to cover these shifts. What are the governments going to do when we're all burnt out and unable to work. They need to see that to increase productivity and efficiency they need to employ more staff and train more nurses, after all we are providing a service to sick people, not robots manufacturing cars!!

I don't really agree that your skills that you have learnt will suffer, sure if you plonked me in the middle of a med/surg unit I would flounder for a while and would be considered slow by the regular staff, but if we get a patient on our unit who has med/surg issues as well as psych problems I can still nurse this person holistically. What I'm trying to say is that just because one does psych nursing it doesn't mean that you throw all your other skills out the window, they can be just as necessary in a psych unit.

It'll be a help to all the psych nurses who didn't do med/surg they'll be able to say that you'll be able to do a procedure better that them(means less work for them) or am I being too cynical? I went into psych nursing after only a couple of months med/surg nursing and haven't looked back.

Nursing issues: poor staffing levels, no lifting policies that are not adhered to,zero tolerance to violence policy that also seems not to be followed, increased paperwork and less patient time, inability to attend training/education because of poor staffing levels. Just to set the ball rolling!!

Generally 8 hour shifts is the norm in Qld, some places offer variations. We also have a shortage of staff and the staff we have is becoming burnt out by the use of overtime.

We are a 22 bed unit attached to a small general hospital, we have use of security when someone pushes the duress alarm or to prevent a situation by using a show of force. Our security also look for prompts from nursing staff in these situations. Our security guards also wander through the unit at different times of the day so the clients see them as less of a threat. We have also had training in how to restrain clients when necessary ( but as for follow up refreshers and practice, bad luck!).

Hi, we have a 22 bed unit and we generally have 6 staff on an am shift, 5 on a pm shift and 4 on night duty. We usually have a CN, and a mixture of RN's and EN's

I also work part time in psych and have a young family to care for. Just remember the reason you took the part time work for - your family- and don't feel guilty, the people you work for can't give you back the time you miss out on with your family. I love my job but my motto is "Work to live , not live to work"!

On our ward we have one permanent nurse under thirty (other than our grad nurse who is 20) we have one nurse in his thirties and most of us are in our forties a with a few in their fifties and a couple have reached 60. So no there is no age discrimination in our unit or they'd have no staff!!

the child really needs a lot of education about the whole episode and that if he continues to abuse drugs the likelihood of a good outcome steadily decreases.

people with personality disorders are very challenging. sometimes working with schizophenia patients can be like walking into a party where everyone is drunk to some degree and you are the only sober one there!! manic patients can be extremely tiring, and if the ward is predominately filled with depressed patients one can go home very low.